The normal experience takes place at the Dark Portal, having you go through to stop the impending Iron Horde invasion. You aren't able to defeat the Iron Horde, but you do stop the imminent threat.

Characters that are boosted to Level 90 will have a slightly different experience, with most of the skills removed from their bars and then having abilities unlocked again as they play.

Garrisons

Garrisons should give you access to portions of other professions without making the people that actually have the profession useless.

The mounts in your garrison's stable will be mounts that you own, based on the ones that you use the most.

Garrisons have a new NPC AI system that allows NPCs to behave less like the scripted NPCs we have now.

For example, the Blacksmith could wake up and go to work, work at his forge and become thirsty, eventually taking a break and going to the tavern, and ten finally going back to the barracks to sleep.

This improved AI was made necessary when the team decided to allow players to select where they place buildings in their garrison, making it impossible to pre-script and pre-place all of the NPC interactions.

This system might be used with NPCs in cities and other places in the future.

The location of buildings in your garrison is mostly for personal choice, as the gameplay element of garrisons is selecting which buildings you want for your limited plots.

The team is aware of the problem with the farm in Mists of Pandaria and doesn't want players to feel the need to have garrisons on their alts just to funnel resources to their main.

Players will want to check in with their garrison once per play session, maybe when they log in or out. It won't be a place to idle like cities currently are, as there is no auction house or bank.

Raiding / Misc

There aren't any plans for Mythic only bosses in the Patch 6.0 raids, but there will be some Mythic only elements of the fights, similar to the extra phase on Heroic Garrosh. Mythic only bosses will continue to be added when they make sense.

Ra-den didn't work out as intended. The boss wasn't tested publicly to ensure it remained a surprise and Ion wasn't able to spend as much time as he would have liked watching the internal testing sessions. This resulted in some loopholes in the fight making it live and Ra-den being easier than intended.

The team is aware that the timeline in older content is a little bit inconsistent, but updating the Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King content would take away from Warlords of Draenor development.

Zen Pilgrimage: Return is no longer automatically removed from Monks that leave the Peak of Serenity.

Battlegrounds and Arenas

Resolved a pathing issue with Intervene for Warriors with Glyph of the Watchful Eye equipped while in the Temple of Kotmogu.

Resolved a situation where players were able to retain the Readiness effect from trinkets without equipping them while in a Battleground.

Bug Fixes

Resolved a crash in the client that affected users running Windows XP: Service Pack 3.

Resolved a crash that could occur while loading into an area or instance.

Blue Tweets

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

ClassesI can spec leeching&paralytic but only use 1, bad design or intended? (lock tal accounts for players taking link & sac)
We're OK with *occasionally* one talent making another talent a bad choice. (Celestalon)

Arcane Mages and Destruction Warlocks. Such mindless, spammy, 2-button specs. Really disheartening to watch, nevermind play.
If you think those specs are mindless 2-button rotations, you're not playing them even remotely to their fullest. (Celestalon)

Touch of the Grave doesn't act like other life steals in pvp, and mortal coil doesn't benefit from PVP power +healing. Intended?
Touch of the Grave I'm not sure; we'll be taking a close look at it following the racial changes.Mortal Coil sounds like a bug. (Celestalon)

Hunter (Forums / Skills / WoD Talent Calculator)think all the hunter specs are very similar and only few skills change. What about making BM Melee ? BM God Rexxar had axes, too
We definitely agree that the hunter specs feel the same, and are taking steps to address that. Not melee BM though. (Celestalon)

Monk (Forums / Skills / WoD Talent Calculator)Do you consider boss spinning / mob-ball movement to grab Gift of Ox legit concern, or just intended part of mastering spec?
Intended part of mastering the spec. (Celestalon)The penalty for a brewmaster moving to grab orbs is inflicted on melee/raid rather than the brewmaster tho...
No it's not. If your Brewmaster is moving the boss, or cleaving the raid/melee, he's moving more than he needs to be. (Celestalon)

Is there a Cooldown on Chi Explosion?
No. (Celestalon)Does it replace Blackout Kick? Purify still has a purpose but BoK seems redundant with Chi Explosion.
We're still debating that. The reason not to is if you want to sometimes pool 1 chi for emergencies, so not spend all at once. (Celestalon)Now that I think about it, will it function with the 5th chi from Ascension?
If you cast Chi Explosion with 5 Chi, your explosion hits the whole server....or you're just left with 1 Chi. One of the two. (Celestalon)

Paladin (Forums / Skills / WoD Talent Calculator)Also! Speaking of, any word on Paladin changes/L100 abilities since Blizzcon?
We put Seal of Faith back on our Shelf of Ideas That Have Potential But Aren't Ready For Primetime Yet. (Celestalon)

Rogue (Forums / Skills / WoD Talent Calculator)please tell me some of the upkeep is being rolled in for sub rogues. Between that and positioning, it drives me away!
Upkeep? The upkeep of keeping your poison up? o.O (Celestalon)meaning both rupture and snd - I meant in general not related to the new talent.
Ohhhh, sorry, just assumed due to timing.Sub upkeep: That's the point of subtlety. Subtlety gameplay is defined by that. (Celestalon)Interesting I feel like many players would say FW is sub's defining mechanic.
FW is just one of the things that Subtlety asks you to juggle. (Celestalon)

PvPHorde pvp population: are you just going to let things continue to get worse? Tilting AV and IoC to favor Horde will not help.
We're very concerned about the imbalance and queue times. We have plans but expacs are often the time when people switch. (holinka)

FYI: 1. The ladder is used to calculate rating thresholds for granting titles. 2. We then give titles to people with appropriate rating. (holinka)
Step 1 didn't take low level characters into account. Step 2 accidentally gave titles to low level characters with correct rating. (holinka)
So removing rewards from low level characters doesn't mean more people will get rewards. (holinka)

Good thread about H:A map imbalance in Random Battlegrounds Forgot to mention Twin Peaks is down hill when running the flag as Horde. Slowfall + speed boost.
pretty sure slow fall has a speed cap on it for just this reason (holinka)Not in normals afaik.
RBG win rates are very close to 50/50 on all of these maps (no matter which faction plays Alliance or Horde). (holinka)Thats not very telling? Your system is designed to adjust ratings until 50:50 is achieved.
No that just further proves the point. In RBGs, team skill is equal and map balance would be the only variable. (holinka)

Will PvE realms face PvP realms in Ashran since PvP realms are horde dominated and there won't be enough allies?
It's possible that this will happen in some cases. We'll try to minimize that crossover as much as possible. (holinka)

Updating the old world was the point of Cataclysm. Selective reasoning won't win this argument for you.

You're missing the point. Cata redid all of vanilla and still managed to make more content than we have with WoD. 2 new races, more dungeons, etc. Yet the team was 40% smaller back then. That excuse they like to keep shoving in our faces is something I'd normally wipe my ass with.

You're missing the point. Cata redid all of vanilla and still managed to make more content than we have with WoD. 2 new races, more dungeons, etc. Yet the team was 40% smaller back then. That excuse they like to keep shoving in our faces is something I'd normally wipe my ass with.

Because you've made it your life goal to bash WoW. Also we don't need constantly more races. We got plenty.

It's actually a "gotcha" argument, and it's intellectually dishonest to present as such an all encompassing excuse. I can't fault you or others for your frustration, as Blizzard notoriously is skimpy on art assets and focused on raids historically only a fraction of the player base sees. That's different with LFR, and the largest dev team they've ever had. This issue is multifaceted and if you want to do more than stomp your feet, acknowledge context. We are getting more custom art now as MOP than ever, in a steady stream. More innovation, but it's never enough apparently. They had custom 3d geosets created for every troll on the ISle of Thunder, that was an amazing achievement if you know what went into that. And totally could have been circumvented with the usual geosets.

No, Its an MMO where the RP is expected to be mainly between players. Even if you are a hardcore RPer, how much gameplay are you going to get out of a WHOLE NEW AI for garrison NPCs? Sitting around on your Garrison all by yourself RPing with your blacksmith? Sounds like a cry for help, not compelling gaming.

It's immersion, just like Skyrim, it brings the world to life rather than feeling like you're a frozen amusement park diorama in a wax museum. How can you possibly complain about this?

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Originally Posted by Yig

It's immersion, just like Skyrim, it brings the world to life rather than feeling like you're a frozen amusement park diorama in a wax museum. How can you possibly complain about this?

5 mans are getting much more focus in WOD, with non linear wings, and a number planned for future patches. You are understandably cynical, but bear in mind how much we've known about previous expansions at this point in the dev cycle.

Some more dungeons would be nice. Since ya know, they don't have to redo an entire world and have 40% more staff.

The changes to old world with cata were only partly art based, a lot of it was just quest and zone design. Which is why endgame content for cata outside of dungeons/raid and molten front was so scarce.

Most of the old world changes added a few features to some zone, a lot of it used old art assets they used elsewhere, several zones were virtually unchanged graphically.

When saying something comes at the cost of a raid tier they only meant it literally when talking about the work necessary to make silvermoon flyable. All of its buildings are flat one sided textures and the full versions of them don't exist and never did. In order to make it look like stormwind they would need to make all new textures and rebuild silvermoon from the ground up. That amount of effort could build half the arts assets of a raid instance. Then you compare what you get from a new silvermoon to addition raid art and its easy to see whats worth more. Blizzard doesn't make new cities anymore because they aren't worth the time to make them, they just see too little use.

Finally beta isn't out yet, we can't effectively judge the content or lack thereof for WoD until we get more than piecemeal previews.

ofcourse they have. But your statement is neither here nor there. They're not proclaiming it as a new game industry feature. They're simply stating its something new to wow and they set up such a function within the WoW engine. Look forward to seeing it used throughout the game.

iam quite happy about the stables function. showing your most used mounts and all.

The team is aware that the timeline in older content is a little bit inconsistent, but updating the Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King content would take away from Warlords of Draenor development.

Whoa hold on a sec, they didn't say how many raid tiers it would cost.

Why don't they just put both TBC and WotLK in the Caverns of Time and make one or two quests to explain that the hero, now in Cataclysm, needs to face the tests of old to become stronger before moving on to Pandaria and so on.

Originally Posted by Amber Lemur

The mounts in your garrison's stable will be mounts that you own, based on the ones that you use the most.

But...I try to treat mine evenly! Can't I just pick my favourite ones or swap them daily like I do in my everyday questing life? :<

Looking forward to knowing more about all this stuff though, very interested!

Yeah, before, they said you could just pick your mount. That really needs to be the option, imo. No good reason not to make it that way, and by the system automatically doing it for you based on what mounts you use most, it's just annoying players by taking another possible option out of their hands for no good reason, or an arbitrary reason.

I read that as having 1 Garrison per server, that will be shared between all characters. I realy hope thats what we get.

Nope. 1 per character. There will be a leveling effect for the alts.

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Originally Posted by g0rg0n

No, Its an MMO where the RP is expected to be mainly between players. Even if you are a hardcore RPer, how much gameplay are you going to get out of a WHOLE NEW AI for garrison NPCs? Sitting around on your Garrison all by yourself RPing with your blacksmith? Sounds like a cry for help, not compelling gaming.

Listen. This may be a feature that PVE people enjoy, but there has not been many features given to the rp community. This right here is a god send. Right now people on my rp server (at least in my circle.) are in love with this AI idea.

"The team is aware that the timeline in older content is a little bit inconsistent, but updating the Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King content would take away from Warlords of Draenor development."

Hmm didn't stop them updating vanilla content while still developing Cataclysm. Perhaps the WoW team was bigger back then.

And everyone paid for that in terms of less content.

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Originally Posted by g0rg0n

All the information gathered about Garrisons makes me wonder how many resources are being directed at playing Barbie at the expense of genuine endgame content. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of Garrisons, but developing a WHOLE NEW npc AI so that your blacksmith can go have a drink at the inn no matter where you place it? Seriously??

What new systems would you want in endgame content instead? If you follow the common opinion, endgame for you means raids, rated PvP, and the like. How does developing new systems elsewhere change how endgame turns out? Raids and PvP exist already.

And new systems has a way of spilling over into other content too.

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Originally Posted by g0rg0n

We are constantly being reminded in blue posts that *everything* we want is at the cost of end game content and raid wings. Do you even read the blue trackers?

Your "everything" tends to include the usage of the art team. Developing a new AI system does not.

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Originally Posted by Bantokar

The horde pvp whining is becoming really hilarious.

Agreed. Some people just don't understand that flocking to one side upsets the queues.

Death Knight (Forums / Skills / WoD Talent Calculator)
Touch of the Grave doesn't act like other life steals in pvp, and mortal coil doesn't benefit from PVP power +healing. Intended?
Touch of the Grave I'm not sure; we'll be taking a close look at it following the racial changes.Mortal Coil sounds like a bug. (Celestalon)

Touch of the Grave is a undead passive.
Mortal Coil is a warlock talent.
But its under DK...